


In Medias Res

by Lafayette1777



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Irondad, Whump, god I love ANGST, no one's dealing with their trauma lmao, post homecoming, pre infinity war, spideyson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 10:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14616317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: The boy is a catastrophe on legs, even when he’s not being stabbed.





	In Medias Res

**Author's Note:**

> me: watches infinity war  
> me: immediately and suddenly cares A LOT about tony stark
> 
> @america explain what the fuck is happening to me
> 
> also im moving to nyc for college in like 3 months and i feel like writing this is just like a way to Deal,,,,,,,with That
> 
> anyways this takes place before infinity war because im still not ready to tackle that much angst yet. next fic lmao.

Peter had been under the impression for some time now that he could take a hit. 

He’d thought, in fact, that he was rather good at it—he’d spent a good part of his time in Germany getting thrown around by several much larger men and still made it back for first period on Monday, albeit with an eggplant-colored bruise the size of Saskatchewan stretching from his knee to his armpit. He’d sat crooked for a week, but no one had suspected a thing. Since then he’d been punched in all matter of exciting places by all matter of exciting creatures and, for most part, walked it off. His suit absorbed some of the impact, but the rest was all him. Just a matter of gritting his teeth and waiting for his enhanced body to right itself. 

He might be a little invincible, he thinks. 

Right up until the knife inserts itself between his third and fourth rib, that is. 

“Jesus fuck, you stabbed the Spiderman!” says one of the henchmen, somewhere off to Peter’s right. 

The girl in the mask in front of him, the one with the blade rearranging Peter’s insides, seems as surprised as her own subordinate.

“Yeah, what the fuck, man,” says Peter, but his voice is choked—about an octave higher than it should be. 

The knife, abruptly, vacates his abdomen. And then the three masked, black-clad figures are escaping down the alleyway, the sounds of their footsteps pinging painfully around inside Peter’s head. His knees hit the ground shortly thereafter. 

“Karen, how bad is it?” he squeaks out, reaching out to steady himself against the side of a dumpster. 

“She nicked your liver,” says Karen. “And you’re losing blood at a rate incompatible with someone of your size and blood volume.”

He stops listening after Karen says _liver_ , but only because getting to his feet again causes a surge of pain so powerful it whites out all his senses for a moment. _Liver_ , he thinks distantly. _Could be worse._

Tonight’s patrol hasn’t taken him out of Queens, thankfully—he feels fairly confident he can drag himself the two blocks back home, crawl in his bedroom window, and find a pile of dirty laundry to lie on until his skin stitches itself back together again. Maybe he’ll end up with a cool scar. And if it’s healed enough for a band-aid by midnight maybe he can get started on that calc project—

“Peter, do you want me to alert Mr. Stark?” asks Karen as he stumbles through the intersection of Corona and 57th. 

“Not necessary,” he replies, slurring through the words. His suit is starting to stick to him with sweat, even though it’s a perfectly sedate May evening. A metallic tinge clings to the roof his mouth. 

A gap between streetlights gets him up to his seventh floor window unnoticed, but the climb takes ten years off his life. He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from sliding down the brick facade. His limbs have gone heavy, his neck rolling back perilously with each breath. His bedroom window seems suddenly entirely too far away, but he manages to land with a thud on the floor of the living room. The gasp when he hits the ground escapes involuntarily—his whole body lights up in a constellation of pain. Someone starts screaming. He thinks it might be May at first, but it’s him too. It takes a moment for them both to catch their breath.

“Peter?!” May is in her pajamas, _House Hunters_ playing on the TV in the background. He curls in on himself the moment she touches him. “What the hell happened? What’s going—oh my god—why are you covered in blood?”

“S’not that bad,” he murmurs. He’s slipping pleasantly into shock, now, his eyes unfocusing, limbs going numb. He gets just a glimpse at the front of his suit and wonders why it’s all a different shade of red than usual. 

_That’s probably not good_ , he thinks. And then something along the lines of _liver?_. Then _please, god, no one tell Tony Stark._

 

 

Howard Stark’s personal lab in the basement of the Stark family estate had been off-limits to all but the man himself until his death in 1991. Even then, it had taken Tony a hot minute to bypass some of the trickier security systems. Tony had had his own lab by then, of course—he’d had one since he was four, in some shape or fashion. Either the top bunk of his bed or an abandoned classroom or eventually a flashy MIT work space. But still, there were a couple odds and ends in Howard’s sanctum that interested him. Most notably there was a robot arm that responded astonishingly well to voice commands, even though it seemed to have only been slapped together from spare parts some time after 1986. 

And then there was the chair. 

It was clear it was not one that had ever been sat in. The wicker was unblemished, old-fashioned but unmarred by time. A suit jacket had been thrown over the back of it but it was clear his father had preferred the more straight-backed, leather throne on wheels that as still so casually turned toward the workbench along the right wall. No, this other chair was extraneous, even though it had been rolled up to the other side of the bench as though still in mid-conversation. Eternally in medias res.

He’d kept the superfluous chair in the corner of his eye as he’d wandered around the lab, careful not to give it too much headspace. It was a bit pathetic, really—to assume that it was anything but an extra chair that had found its way downstairs out of the compelling, nebulous force of chaos that cluttered every engineer’s workshop. Pathetic to assume that the chair was ever going to be meant for him, that there had ever been a time when his father expected Tony to join him. They had never been very good at sharing anything—better not to overthink such things. Better not to think at all. 

Still, he’d taken the robot arm and the extra chair with him as he left, and they’d migrated with him through many different workshops over the years. And if he’d paused before he left the basement that night, taken a shuddering breath and collected himself in the shadow of a still-warm heat lamp, then it really isn’t worth remembering anyways. 

The call comes in on a Tuesday night. Tony has never had much of a concept of time to begin with, but especially not in the lab, in a city where the noise never really fades. He’s not listening to music tonight; there’s something in his chest urging him towards silence. Not shrapnel. A feeling that follows him around sometimes when things have gone quiet in his world for just a little too long. He stops soldering, picks up the call on the first ring, but doesn’t look at the ID. 

And then May Parker is screaming at him from what sounds like the back of an ambulance. 

“What hospital?” he asks, already slipping into a suit and lifting off. 

“Flushing,” breathes May, voice ragged. 

They have Peter in surgery by the time he hits the ground. Apparently he’s already woken up, once—metabolized the anesthesia too fast and jolted into consciousness before they’d finished stitching him up. He’s back out now, but May is in tears again, and Tony tracks down the first nurse he can find so he can get Peter transferred upstate. And maybe he takes longer looking over the paperwork than he needs to. Maybe he dawdles, so he doesn’t have to see Peter under the knife, or pale and limp under fluorescent lighting, outside of his control. Maybe. 

Eventually, though, May finds him again. He doesn’t like that he can’t quite read her expression, so he starts talking immediately. 

“There’s a chopper on the roof to take him to the Compound,” Tony spills out. “They don’t know how to handle him here. They’ll end up asking too many questions.”

May just nods, eyes still boring into him. He’s not sure if there’s blame, somewhere in her dark irises. Or guilt. The feelings are too similar to tell apart. He sets his face into something impenetrable and keeps talking. 

“Little shit must’ve hacked his suit again,” Tony says. “I should’ve gotten an alert sooner.”

May isn’t looking at him anymore. She’s turning, starting off down the hall. Tony hurries to keep up. 

“Do you know what happened?” he asks, matching her pace. 

She shakes her head without a word. 

“Do you need anything?” he tries again. “I can swing by your apartment before heading Upstate.”

May stops, finally, in front of what Tony can only assume is Peter’s post-op room. Through the cracked door he can see the vague shape of a foot, unmoving under a thin blanket, but he doesn’t look any further. He can feel something inside his chest splintering at just the thought. A new and unknown piece of himself; something he didn’t know he could break until recently. Until Germany. The threat may be more or less contained now, but the precipice still lingers. 

Finally, May says, “I didn’t think—I’ve never seen him with anything more than a bruise.”

“I guess he can’t regenerate but so fast,” replies Tony, his thoughts already speeding ahead. He stops himself from letting anything else slip. This was Tony’s job to do—keep the kid safe while Peter does everything possible to put himself perpetually into the line of fire. This is Tony’s problem to solve. 

May enters Peter’s room without looking back. A crew of paramedics is already speeding down the hallway, ready to whisk the two of them up to the helicopter. Tony takes one last look inside the room, catches a glimpse of a pale hand with an IV taped to the back of it, then turns to march resolutely in the other direction. 

 

 

There’s not much to hold onto, for a while. Peter is used to last minute saves, to getting a grip on the side of a building just before the pavement rushes up to greet him. But he passes out on the living room floor, stains the shag carpet next to the coffee table with blood, and there’s nothing to grab onto after that. 

He wakes up again under a blindingly white light just as something slices into his skin, though. And it’s sensory overload for a while—everything he can filter out when he’s in control of himself comes rushing back in like a Long Island high tide. The heart rate monitor is a roar. He can hear a rat scuttling through the subway three blocks away. And there’s the pain, too. It feels like something is reaching inside him, twisting his organs into some new and terrible configuration. He screams until a mask goes over his nose and mouth, until things start to fade out again. 

And then he dreams. 

Of birds with glowing green eyes and buildings collapsing in on themselves and masked figures in alleyways. Captain America, eyes obscured, kicks the shit out of him in a parking lot, embeds the sharp edge of his shield between Peter’s ribs and walks away. He falls and falls, past rooftops and Iron Man suits and bedroom windows, into a soft darkness below.

 

 

The Parker residence is well known to him, not from personal experience so much as by persistent surveillance. Tony lets himself in with the quietest click of the lock he can manage, even though he knows the apartment is empty. Every tap of his shoes on the linoleum floor of the hallway feels like a disturbance. The TV is still on, and there’s a half eaten burrito on the counter. A dark patch of dried blood by the still-open window lodges Tony’s heart further into his throat. The plan is to grab some clothes for the kid and May and get out, but he can’t help but pause and stare at the spot until his eyes unfocus. 

In Peter’s bedroom he finds a pile of half-folded laundry on the floor, an unfinished CS problem set on his desk. _In medias res_ , Tony thinks distantly. Another room full of remnants; another room left in the lurch. He worries about the lump in his throat until he sees four crumpled cans of Red Bull in the trash and the exasperation washes everything else away. A tiny catastrophe, the boy is. How he’s not dead in his pajamas in a ditch somewhere, Tony will never know. 

He sits down on the end of the unmade bed and takes a breath. 

It must be Wednesday, by now. Early in the morning, but still Wednesday—one of the days of the week Peter usually ends up spending at Tony’s Manhattan penthouse after school, in the expansive lab occupying the entire loft. It’s become a ritual, even though they’re both careful not to call it that. Tinkering with Peter’s suit or the web fluid or whatever project Tony wants the kid’s input on. Talking and talking; neither of them have ever been known for their ability to shut the fuck up. Their combined manic energy is overwhelming to anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the same room. Of course this is the kid that would latch onto Tony. _Of course._

“FRIDAY, status update on Parker.”

“They just touched down at the Compound,” she chirps. “Vitals are stable.”

“Flight time from Queens?” He gets to his feet. 

“Twenty minutes subsonic in current weather conditions,” she replies. “Eight knot crosswind out of the northwest below ten thousand feet.”

“Not bad,” he murmurs. A breeze slides in through the cracked window and ruffles a pile of papers on the desk. The room feels a little less stagnant than it had a moment ago. Tony lets out a long breath, and gets moving. 

 

 

“Well, this is embarrassing,” is the first thing out of Peter’s mouth when he comes to. Judging by May’s expression, once her head rises out of her hands, this was most definitely the wrong thing to say. He must still look pretty bad, considering the fact that she doesn’t try to immediately throttle him. 

Instead, the fury in her eyes subsides, and is replaced by something worse. She deflates. “Jesus, Peter,” she mutters, face falling back into her palms. “Just. I don’t even know what to say. Jesus Christ.”

“May—” he starts. He means to say _I’m sorry_ , or at least something that may begin to assuage the shame climbing up his throat, but instead his voice breaks on the single syllable. 

Without a word, she rises from the chair next to his bed and gathers him close to her. Peter leans forward in the bed, wires pulling at him from all angles, so that he can bury his face in her shirt. It’s only when the shake in his shoulders subsides that she asks, “Is this how it’s going to be now?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” says a voice.

Tony has appeared in the doorway, arms folded tight over his chest. Peter disentangles himself enough to see that Stark’s eyes are pointed squarely at the floor. 

“The suit,” Tony says. “I can do better.”

Abruptly, he turns on his heel, footsteps fading down the hallway before Peter can get anything beyond “Mr. Stark—” out of his mouth. Perhaps it’s for the better, he thinks. He’s not sure what he could say to Tony anyways. Another apology? He’d apologized last week, when he’d gotten tossed off the GW bridge and Mr. Stark had had to recalibrate some of the microscopic heating coils in his suit. He’d apologized when he’d leapt through the windshield of a crashed car in February and torn half his sleeve off on the glass. 

This is different. 

Stark is already out of sight. May runs a hand through Peter’s hair once more and settles back into her seat. He sniffles a little, then pulls absently at the IV taped into the back of his hand until he can breathe again. It’s all too much—just like after what happened with Ben, and with his parents. Too much to process, too much data to sort through. He needs his mask, needs something to winnow down his world into more palatable pieces, sort out all that is extraneous and complicated and painful. 

May pulls off her glasses to give her eyes an exhausted rub and Peter wishes, suddenly and desperately, that he could disappear off the face of the earth. 

 

 

It’s a problem he’s already parsing through on the flight over from Queens: how to develop a fiber strong enough to deflect a knife blade while still remaining lightweight and breathable. It’s ridiculous, truly, that he hasn’t thought of this before—what good is a suit for the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man if it can’t even deflect a pocketknife in an alleyway? It was stupid to assume that the kid’s regeneration abilities extended out infinitely, stupid to assume that there would never be an injury that outmatched him and left him bleeding out on the pavement—

His hands start moving; he stops thinking, but only for a moment. 

The basement lab at the Compound is not as cozy as the one he’s set up in the city, but it is expansive. And quiet. Unnervingly so. There’s also only one chair, which he appreciates only so that he doesn’t have to see an empty one staring at him from across the bench. He thinks about the kid, floors above him, in May’s arms when Tony had come to see him. The smallness of him. He thinks about Germany. About all the mistakes he’s made and tried to rectify by making more. And endless cycle of mistake leading into mistake leading into mistake. A conscious choice everyday to walk the same path and pray for a different destination. And then the kid, again. Small. Alive and dead. A Schrödinger's cat every time he slips the mask on and ventures out. And Tony, somewhere in there, waiting. Waiting for the next mistake. The last one. 

The fibers in the updated suit will have to be enormously dense, he thinks. But malleable. 

His hands are moving faster than his thoughts; a delicious relinquishing of control. 

He leans forward and gets to work. 

 

 

Within a few hours the stitches start to fall out of his skin as the two jagged edges of the wound reach toward each other with preternatural haste. There’s still an ache radiating up his torso, a strange tightness when he raises his arm, a general nausea that has him squeezing his lips together in an attempt to quell it, but overall he knows he’s heading back toward equilibrium. This is what he’s used to. The new vulnerability is unsettling, even though a few years ago it would’ve been all there was to expect. He’s been relying on his own inhuman characteristics for so long now that he’s forgotten what the other side feels like. He’s forgotten what it feels like to bleed. 

He convinces May to head home for a little while, at least, so that she can rest and shower and square things away with her boss. Once she’s gone, he slips into the clothes that have appeared by his bedside. 

And then he wanders. 

The Compound is a strangely empty place. It’s not hard to figure out why Mr. Stark prefers the city. He ducks his head into a few bedrooms, sees a few still half-populated by belongings. The remnants of the fight in Germany, he supposes. He didn’t think the outcome of such an extravaganza of violence and collateral damage would be this stillness, this radiant quiet from all sides. 

He ends up in the elevator, inspecting the array of buttons and settling on _Sublevel 2 - Laboratory_. Maybe it’s just the allure of a well-stocked Stark lab that draws him there, or maybe it’s something else. Regardless, he’s not at all surprised to find Tony there, bent over a workbench and using a welding mask as an armrest. 

A wave nausea rolls through Peter again. He swallows. 

“Hey, kid,” says Tony, without looking up. He shifts his arm, though, and Peter gets a glance at what he’s working on. A red and blue suit, disassembled into its component layers. It’s not what he was expecting. There was some part of him that assumed that enough time had been wasted on him already, that surely by now Tony Stark would be back to catching up on Tony Stark things—attending charity balls and appearing before congress and occasionally saving the world from aliens and rogue Captain Americas. Surely Peter has taken up enough of his time.

His silence is noticed; Stark turns to look at him, sees his strained expression. 

“Alright, Pete?” he asks. “You look pale.”

Peter doesn’t have time to reply before an antique-looking wicker chair is being shoved toward him. He sinks into it gratefully, an ache running up his side and spreading across his chest, and then wonders how long Mr. Stark has been on his feet. 

“Survival,” Tony says, eyes sliding back down to his work. “It’s all sharp edges, you know what I mean?”

Somehow, he does. 

“Mr. Stark, I’m sorry,” he finds himself saying, voice hoarse. “I don’t know what happened—I wasn’t thinki—”

The clatter of a metal instrument hitting the table cuts him off. Stark doesn’t say anything, just closes his eyes in a long, fortifying blink before turning his full gaze on Peter. 

“ _You_ are not the one that should be apologizing,” he says eventually, then takes a long breath through his nose. “I dragged you into all this, made you this suit, put you in the line of fire, before I really knew what it was going to mean.”

He looks like he wants to say more, but Peter jumps in. “That’s not really true, though? I was swinging around in my pajamas before I met you. I would definitely be dead by now if you hadn’t showed up in my apartment last year.”

If there’s anything Peter is sure of it’s that his own capacity for doing dumb, dangerous shit knows absolutely no bounds. There’s a part of him that can’t help but plough into danger, no matter how many times he reminds himself of what it does to May. 

Tony’s still looking at him, eyes narrowed. 

Peter shrugs. “So I guess you’ve already kind of saved my life.”

Tony’s silence is becoming disconcerting. Peter waits for the other shoe to drop—for Tony to try to convince him to give up being Spider-Man, take the suit back, sever all ties in some circuitous attempt to get Peter to see reason. But his expression is impenetrable. The mind of Tony Stark remains a mystery. 

“Are you gonna help me with this or just sit there?” Tony says finally, eyes swerving back down to the suit in front of him. Peter rolls himself forward just as Tony brings up a virtual schematic with an languid flick of his wrist. He slides sideways, making room for Peter at the desk and motioning toward the cracked open spider-shaped chest piece. “Start soldering.”

 

 

 

 

“Has your aunt forgiven me for getting you stabbed yet?” Tony asks, the moment Peter slips into the passenger seat. 

“She doesn’t talk about lighting your couch on fire as much,” he replies. “That’s progress.”

There’s silence, for a moment. The subject of forgiveness, of blame, has become something of a loaded one, progress or not. There’s been improvement elsewhere in the last few weeks, though. Only the slightest ache in his side when he reaches up to shoot a web or glide between skyscrapers. A benign little scar. And no more life threatening incidents, recently—Peter’s been doing his best to become a lower-maintenance superhero. 

(And he’s trying not to die. Perhaps trying a little harder now that he realizes how easy it is to do the opposite.)

But since the stabbing it seems like he’s ended up spending even more time in Tony’s presence than before, despite his efforts to stop being such a nuisance. More often than not he ends up at dinner with Tony and Pepper when May’s on second shift, or in the lab with Tony all day to avoid the heat. Maybe it’s just because May’s been working a lot, or because Ned and MJ have both gone off on vacation with their families since they got out of school. He gets the feeling Stark knows how much time he’s been spending on his own lately, so maybe he’s just trying to keep Peter from running into knives out of boredom. It’s a little pathetic to think of Tony inviting him over out of pity, but Peter doesn’t have another explanation. 

(Well, maybe he does. But that’s part of the thing they’re not talking about anymore—an impasse preserved since that night in the Compound lab. Carefully assigning no blame. Carefully not dealing with the fact that Peter is in the line of fire for good. Maybe it’s not quite healthy, to maintain such silence. But it’s not like either of them have know any other way.)

“Where are we going?” Peter asks, as they accelerate onto the highway. 

“Coney Island,” says Tony, as though it should be obvious. “I know a hell of a clam bar. Open for lunch.”

“What’s the occasion?”

Before Tony can answer, though, a BMW cuts him off and the question is lost in the ensuing litany of insults. Peter rolls down the window, tastes the air as it lightens from city murk into something balmy and salt-tinged. It’s hard not to feel a little ridiculous like this—seated in the passenger seat of a billionaire’s Maserati, on the way to eat clams in the middle of the afternoon. _Ben wouldn’t believe this_ , he thinks distantly, and then decides to focus his efforts on maybe not thinking anything at all. 

They end up with a window table. Peter watches Tony, watches the ocean, watches the clams cracking apart beneath his fingers. Circulates his gaze through all three subjects in a steady rhythm, taking it all in. It’s hard not to feel like this is all something delightful and temporary. The kind of afternoon that could be snatched away so easily by an alien army or an arms dealer hijacking an invisible plane or just a girl with a knife. 

“I think I’m gonna apply to MIT,” he hears himself say. He’s actually never thought about it outside of this exact moment, but now he feels that it must be true, somehow. It must be the only way to preserve an afternoon like this.

The look that Tony gives him confirms this. 

“That’s amazing, Pete,” he says, his voice a shade softer than Peter’s ever heard. “That’s amazing. You’ll be great there. Obviously.”

“But I don’t want you to help me get in or anything,” Peter says quickly. “Like, I know it’s competitive and stuff but I’ll do it on my own if I’m gonna do it—”

“Of course, of course,” Tony says, waving a hand. “You don’t need me to get you in there, anyways.”

Tony’s actually smiling at him now—not a hint of snark or exasperation. An untainted expression. Peter’s never been to Boston, doesn’t have the slightest idea what MIT even looks like, but if it’s anything at all like this moment then, surely, it’ll do. 

Eventually Tony goes off to pay the bill at the register and Peter looks down at his phone. He manages to scroll through half a dozen suspiciously similar photos on Instagram until he finally starts reading the captions and then—

_Oh_ , he thinks. 

_Happy Father’s Day!_ seems to lurk beneath each of his friends’ posts. He scrolls past an ad for golf clubs and then closes the app all together. Tony is wandering back through the maze of tables toward him. Peter realizes he’s not sure what to say once he gets here. He feels certain this falls into that category of things they’re not talking about. 

Or maybe he’ll just say _thank you_.

But he ends up not saying anything. Because Tony’s whisking him off, now, and they’ll spend the rest of the day in his Manhattan lab, putting the finishing touches on the new suit. The city lab is better than the Compound one, Peter thinks. Two seats instead of one, so they can lean over the same bench, share the same tools. Working away at whatever they please, never more than arm’s length from each other. 

And it occurs to Peter that he doesn’t quite know what all this is, or how long it’ll last. 

But, for now, he’s just very glad to have it at all.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com
> 
> (PLEASE come talk to me about metal trauma man and his fucked up science spider kid)


End file.
